My 5-Step Writing System Produces 1,000’s of Words Per Week
Writing is a dance between chaos and order
“I’ve realized I’m such a chaotic person, I can’t go traveling on my own,” my friend Inga said to me yesterday. Inga is a beautiful soul who lives from a place of spontaneity and adventure. She’s the perfect travel companion because if you travel with her, she’ll encourage you to follow your whims, explore, and go far away from the usual tourist traps.
But — Inga doesn’t have structure or a plan in her travels. There are some aspects of travel — booking accommodation, catching flights, arranging transport — that require thinking ahead, and forward planning. Those aren’t Inga’s strengths.
A good travel experience is a dance between chaos and order, between spontaneity and carefully laid plans. Find the balance between those two, and you’re likely to have a great time on your journey.
This dance between chaos and order is of the reasons why there’s no ‘perfect’ travel experience. If you try to bottle up what makes a travel experience magical (as many package tours do), then you lose the magic. It’s like William Blake said:
He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise
I searched for the ‘secrets’ of writing — and couldn’t find them
When I started creative writing consistently, I wanted to know the “secrets” of top-performing writers. What was their writing system? How did they produce so much incredible content? I wanted to find the perfect writing process.
It was the wrong question. I ended up frustrated. Plenty of writers share how they write. But the more I looked into their systems, the more confusing it became. There didn’t seem to be consistency in how they did things.
Sometimes they’d write while listening to music, sometimes not. Sometimes they’d use a podcast for inspiration, sometimes a story from their own life. Sometimes they’d write to a timer, sometimes not. I felt like they were being elusive.
“Can somebody just tell me how this is done?!” I wanted to shout.
